• Open Menu Close Menu
  • Apple
  • Shopping Bag
  • Apple
  • Mac
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Watch
  • TV
  • Music
  • Support
  • Search apple.com
  • Shopping Bag

Lists

Open Menu Close Menu
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Lists hosted on this site
  • Email the Postmaster
  • Tips for posting to public mailing lists
Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Meta:] : be aware...


  • Subject: Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
  • From: David B.Gustavson <email@hidden>
  • Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:06:33 -0700

At 5:37 AM +0100 2007/06/22, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
I feel more comfortable now!
etc.

I think it's important that you realize before you start that some aspects of AppleScript are intrinsically DIFFICULT and nobody should feel bad if they need help.

In a way, that's good--it means that coding AppleScript for most of us is inherently a social activity, because there's nearly always some aspect of whatever we want to do that isn't well documented, and doesn't work the way we'd expect it to, so we have to consult a group like this (great) one!

AppleScript is easy in some ways, once you get enough experience with it. But it's kind of a read-only language! (Most languages I've had experience with over a long career are more write-only: the author can express what he wants to do and make it happen, but nobody else can understand what he was thinking without a lot of work, and even the author can't remember how to read his program after a while).

With AppleScript, it generally seems easy to read a working program and figure out what it is doing, and often it's easy to modify it a little to do what you want. It kind of reads like English.

But writing a program from zero is really hard, because some of the details of what you have to write depend on details of which application you are scripting, and though there's some system and uniformity to how applications behave in general, the details can differ a lot, in ways that aren't obvious. Once you have a lot of experience, you can usually think of the likely variety of ways that might work to achieve your goal, but often you have to ask a large group like this "has anyone figured out how to make application Blah do bletch...?"

So, given the history you shared with us, I think it's important that you realize that when things don't work at first, you should not take it personally. It's not your fault--AppleScript really does require certain phrasings sometimes that you're unlikely to be able to guess or to find in any documentation. They're like magical incantations. Try several things, experiment, read similar example programs, and ask for help.

In some ways, AppleScript is one of the hardest languages to master. Other languages are more self-contained, in the sense that they are thoroughly documented (and the documents can be found), and their behavior is less dependent on the vagaries of the various implementations of other pieces of software. For example, I recently learned PHP and MySQL programming, and though it's a very rich environment with great power, it seems to me much easier than AppleScript.

On the other hand, playing with AppleScript on the Mac can be rewarding, because the results are immediate and, one hopes, useful to you. I've found Script Debugger to be very helpful...

Dave G
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
AppleScript-Users mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
Archives: http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users

This email sent to email@hidden
  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
      • From: Ruth Bygrave <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: [Meta:] Re: Amazon Web Services (From: "Gary (Lists)" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: [Meta:] (From: Ruth Bygrave <email@hidden>)

  • Prev by Date: POSIX path to file
  • Next by Date: Re: 'do JavaScript' still broken in Safari 3 beta
  • Previous by thread: Re: [Meta:]
  • Next by thread: Re: [Meta:] : be aware...
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread